Is cursor shadow workspace still available?

Support Help
1

it was suppose to make cursor 10X better but is it stil around?

5

Hey, thanks for the request. Shadow Workspace was an experimental beta feature from 2024. It was a hidden background window that let you get lint results for AI edits without getting in the way in your main editor. As a user-facing feature, it doesn’t exist anymore, and the toggle was removed from settings.

But the idea didn’t go away, it’s just implemented differently now:

  • The Agent now checks linter errors and diagnostics on its own after it makes edits.
  • The isolated background workflow moved to git worktrees and background or cloud agents.

So there’s nothing to enable. What Shadow Workspace was made for now works out of the box. The blog post is still up at Iterating with shadow workspaces · Cursor, so it can feel like the feature still exists, but it’s more of a historical reference now.

6

Hi Dean,

Thanks for the explanation.

However, I am still able to enable it. I asked Cursor to enable it, it made some changes, and it might be running in the background. Could you clarify why this is the case?

i thinks its taking ton of ram

Best regards,
Faheem Ahmad

7

Hey Faheem,

What the agent “enabled” is almost certainly a no-op. The cursor.general.enableShadowWorkspace setting is no longer registered in Cursor. The agent might have added it to settings.json or touched a related config, but it doesn’t start anything. There is no user-facing Shadow Workspace, so there isn’t any background shadow process running. Whatever the agent “enabled” has no effect.

About the RAM, it’s most likely normal Cursor usage and not related to that setting. To figure out what’s using memory:

  • Open Process Explorer: Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+P > Developer: Open Process Explorer and check which process is using RAM. It’s usually extensionHost or a renderer process.
  • Quick extensions test: run cursor --disable-extensions in your terminal and compare memory usage.

Also, if you want to roll back the agent’s changes, send what exactly it changed, like which lines in settings.json or other files, and I’ll tell you what you can safely remove. Deleting enableShadowWorkspace is safe since it doesn’t affect anything anyway.

Let me know what Process Explorer shows.